Strange as it may seem to say this
of the literary Gilray who drew the portrait of Dr. Slop, and of the
literary Grimaldi who tormented Phutatorius with the hot chestnut,
it is nevertheless the fact that scene after scene may be cited from
_Tristram Shandy_, and those the most delightful in the book, which
are not only free from even the momentary intrusion of either the
clown or the caricaturist, but even from the presence of "comic
properties" (as actors would call them) of any kind: scenes of which
the external setting is of the simplest possible character, while the
humour is of that deepest and most penetrative kind which springs
from the eternal incongruities of human nature, the ever-recurring
cross-purposes of human lives.
Carlyle classes Sterne with Cervantes among the great humourists of
the world; and from one, and that the most important, point of view
the praise is not extravagant. By no other writer besides Sterne,
perhaps, since the days of the Spanish humourist, have the vast
incongruities of human character been set forth with so masterly a
hand. It is in virtue of the new insight which his humour opens to
us of the immensity and variety of man's life that Cervantes makes
us feel that he is _great_: not delightful merely--not even eternally
delightful only, and secure of immortality through the perennial human
need of joy--but _great_, but immortal, in right of that which makes
Shakspeare and the Greek dramatists immortal, namely, the power, not
alone over the pleasure-loving part of man's nature, but over that
equally universal but more enduring element in it, his emotions of
wonder and of awe.
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